Evolution of language symptoms in narrative production: A single-case study of Broca's aphasia

Abstract

In producing an oral narrative such as a fairy tale, the content can be expressed in numerous forms. The lexical items depicting the agents, the objects, and the activities which make up the story, the syntactic structures, and the type of speech produced can vary. Narratives produced by persons with aphasia (PWA) reveal features that are intact and others that are indicative of impaired language processing. Thus, long-term analysis of narratives produced by PWAs provides a unique opportunity to examine the evolution of the predominant symptoms affecting narrative production. Initially due to the severity of language impairment, symptoms may overlap and mask specific deficits which are initially difficult to separate from one another and/or required features may be omitted and substituted. The aim of this single case study is to characterize the changes in the use of direct and reported speech in the (re-)telling of the fairy tale ‘Cinderella’ over time in the context of the overall language recovery process. The main question addressed is to what extent the availability of specific structures influences narrative production: Is there a tendency for direct speech to be correctly, differentially used by TH in his production of the fairy tale ‘Cinderella’ at various stages of language recovery in contrast to describing the succession of events not using direct speech